Whose Knowledge Gets the Top Shelf? Examining the Power Embedded in LCSH's Hierarchical Design

A library catalog is rarely understood as a political document. Yet the arrangement of subject headings—which terms appear at the top of a hierarchy, which serve as narrower terms, and which are relegated to "see also" references—encodes assumptions about whose knowledge matters, whose frameworks are universal, and whose traditions require qualification. The Library of Congress Subject Headings system, developed over more than a century and now embedded in catalogs across thousands of American institutions, reflects those assumptions at scale.

This is not a new critique. Scholars including Sanford Berman and, more recently, a generation of critical cataloging researchers have documented specific instances of bias within LCSH. What has received somewhat less sustained attention, however, is the structural dimension of the problem: not merely which terms are offensive or outdated, but how the hierarchical logic of the system itself operates as a form of epistemic gatekeeping.

The Architecture of Authority

LCSH is, at its core, a controlled vocabulary organized through hierarchical relationships. Broader terms (BT), narrower terms (NT), and related terms (RT) establish a taxonomy that signals intellectual proximity and subordination. When a concept appears as a narrower term beneath a broader heading, that relationship is not neutral—it positions the subordinate concept as a species of the genus above it, framed by the conceptual assumptions built into the parent heading.

Consider how this plays out across disciplines. In the realm of medicine and healing, the heading "Medicine" functions as a broad, unmarked category. Practices rooted in non-Western traditions—Ayurvedic medicine, Traditional Chinese medicine, Indigenous healing practices—appear as narrower terms or as subdivisions requiring geographic or cultural qualifiers. The implicit message embedded in this structure is that "Medicine" means Western biomedicine, while everything else is a regional variant requiring additional specification.

This is not merely a semantic inconvenience. For researchers, students, and community members seeking materials that center non-Western medical epistemologies, the catalog's hierarchy communicates a clear, if unintentional, message: your framework is the exception, not the rule.

Philosophy, Theology, and the Geography of Thought

The domain of philosophy offers another instructive case. The heading "Philosophy" in LCSH, when used without geographic subdivision, typically defaults to the Western philosophical tradition. Works in African philosophy, South Asian philosophy, or Indigenous North American philosophical thought require explicit geographic or cultural qualifiers to be retrievable as such. The unqualified term belongs, by default, to one tradition.

Similar dynamics emerge in religious studies. "Theology" as a standalone heading skews heavily toward Christian theology in practice, with other traditions designated through qualifiers—"Islamic theology," "Buddhist philosophy"—that mark them as departures from an unmarked norm. Critics have noted that this structure does not merely reflect historical cataloging practice; it actively shapes what researchers find when they begin an inquiry without knowing in advance which tradition they are seeking.

For librarians serving diverse populations—and American academic libraries serve increasingly diverse student bodies—these structural defaults create real barriers to discovery.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Limits of the Hierarchical Frame

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between LCSH's hierarchical logic and non-Western epistemologies more pronounced than in the cataloging of Indigenous knowledge systems. Many Indigenous traditions do not organize knowledge according to the subject-discipline boundaries that LCSH takes for granted. Ecological knowledge, spiritual practice, legal tradition, and community history may be understood as inseparable within a given Indigenous framework—yet the catalog requires that materials be assigned to discrete subject categories that cleave these relationships apart.

Efforts by institutions such as the Xwi7xwa Library at the University of British Columbia and the work of the Brian Deer Classification System represent serious attempts to build alternative organizational frameworks that honor Indigenous knowledge structures. Within the United States, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, developed collaboratively by Indigenous communities and archivists, has prompted a number of institutions to reconsider how they apply LCSH to collections of Indigenous materials.

These projects share a common recognition: that the problem is not simply one of terminology but of taxonomy itself. When the organizational container is shaped by assumptions foreign to the materials it holds, no amount of terminological revision will fully resolve the distortion.

The Institutional Default and Its Consequences

It is worth acknowledging that hierarchical organization of some kind is functionally necessary for large-scale information retrieval systems. The question is not whether to have a hierarchy, but whose assumptions should shape it—and how transparent those assumptions should be to the people navigating the system.

LCSH was developed within a specific institutional context: the Library of Congress, a federal institution serving the legislative and research needs of the United States government, operating during an era when the intellectual frameworks of Western Europe and North America were treated as the unmarked standard against which other traditions were measured. The system's hierarchical choices were not arbitrary; they reflected the intellectual culture of their time and place.

The difficulty is that those choices, once embedded in a widely adopted standard, become extraordinarily durable. Libraries across the country catalog new materials using the same inherited structures, and the accumulated weight of millions of catalog records makes wholesale revision a daunting prospect. The hierarchy perpetuates itself not through malice but through institutional inertia.

Emerging Alternatives and Hybrid Approaches

Librarians and cataloging theorists are not waiting for a single comprehensive solution. Across the profession, a range of strategies is gaining traction. Some institutions are supplementing LCSH with locally developed subject headings drawn from community vocabularies, creating parallel access points that reflect the frameworks of the communities whose materials are being described.

Others are exploring the potential of linked data architectures, which allow subject headings from multiple controlled vocabularies to be connected without forcing one hierarchy to govern all others. Under a linked data model, a catalog record might simultaneously express a concept's position within LCSH's hierarchy and its relationship to terms from the Homosaurus, the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, or a tribally developed vocabulary—offering users multiple entry points rather than a single authoritative path.

Faceted classification approaches, which allow concepts to be described along multiple independent dimensions rather than nested within a single tree, offer another avenue for reducing the distortions introduced by hierarchical subordination. While full faceted reclassification of existing collections remains impractical for most institutions, faceted elements are increasingly being integrated into discovery systems that sit atop traditional MARC-based catalogs.

Toward a More Reflexive Cataloging Practice

None of these approaches resolves the underlying tension between the practical necessity of structured organization and the epistemological diversity of human knowledge. What they represent, collectively, is a growing recognition within the cataloging profession that the hierarchy is not a neutral scaffold but a statement of intellectual priorities—and that making that statement more equitable requires ongoing, deliberate effort.

For information professionals working within LCSH-governed systems today, the most immediate contribution may be one of critical reflexivity: examining the structural assumptions embedded in the headings they assign, advocating for revisions that reduce the unmarked privilege of dominant epistemologies, and communicating clearly with the communities they serve about the limitations of the catalog's organizational logic.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings system will not be rebuilt from the ground up anytime soon. But the profession's understanding of what that system does—and what it costs—continues to deepen. That deepening is itself a form of progress.